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More dubious triumphs for big tasting competitions!

The Decanter Awards results don’t seem to have aroused as much interest as the rather lacklustre winners on the mysteriously popular Michelangelo Award list. One nice thing about Decanter is that, like Veritas, it gives out as many prizes as possible. There are four tiers of them: Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Commended. It’s nice, because sceptics like me who get a despairing pleasure out of registering the absurdities of all these big tasting competitions can more easily compare extremes of winning and losing.

So, if anyone else would like to compare, here are two lists. One is the list of the 26 Gold Medal Winners. The other is the same number of wines taken from the dregs of the results – the fourth-level Commended medalists. See if you think either is much more convincing than the other.

Well, it was List 2 that has the wines sprinkled with Decanter gold. Including some bizarre surprises as well as some very fine wines. My point is not that the winners are not (mostly) plausible – but that they’re not more plausible than many of the losers – and I haven’t even considered the bronze medallists, including such fine wines as Glenelly Lady May and Klein Constantia Vin de Constance that clearly weren’t much thought of by the judges.

And it does seem hard to accept the validity of a process that rates Drostdy Hof Chardonnay and a supermarket’s cheap own-brand chenin as so much higher than Steenberg Magna Carta and Hartenberg Gravel Hill.

I suppose it’s like so many other mysteries. You either believe in the nonsense, or you don’t.